


dressing birds as fighter planes

by middnighter



Series: halbarry + cliché fanfic tropes [2]
Category: Green Lantern (Comics), The Flash (Comics)
Genre: Getting Together, Humor, Light-Hearted, Love Confessions, M/M, barry gets kidnapped by aliens, because that's just how life is sometimes, unexpected emotional vulnerability, warning: mentions of oliver queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 22:38:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14882532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middnighter/pseuds/middnighter
Summary: The story of how Barry got abducted by aliens, which lead him to learn something about his best friend.





	dressing birds as fighter planes

**Author's Note:**

> i hit a bit of a writing slump and these two always get me back on the writing train so!
> 
> this is the fill for "aliens made them do it" on my cliché fanfic tropes bingo card. it's not very 'aliens made them do it'-ish though, more like 'aliens accidentally play matchmaker'. 
> 
> title loosely translated from a lyric of the song flash by stéphanie de monaco -- listen to it and ask a french-speaking person to translate it for you. you'll thank me later.
> 
> i'm gonna be honest i don't really know what is going on in this fic so enjoy i guess!

When Barry woke up, he wasn’t in his bed. He wasn’t even in his apartment.

He blinked a few times, his eyes adjusting to the brightness of the room. It was huge, and would look like a courtroom if the seats and tables weren’t floating in the air. An assembly of non-human looking people was looking at him —or so he assumed, given that he couldn’t find where their eyes were— and conversing in a language Barry did not understand.

So he probably wasn’t on Earth anymore. Instead, he was in his pajamas, in front of about fifty aliens. Oh, that was just _great_.

He rubbed his eyes.

“Hi Barry,” he heard a familiar voice say. He turned his head towards the source of the sound. Hal was standing a few feet away in his Green Lantern outfit, waving at him with a little smile.

“What is going on?” Barry asked, still not completely awake. “Please don’t tell me we got kidnapped by aliens.”

“ _You_ got kidnapped by aliens. I’m just here on a mission.” Hal gave him a glance. “Nice boxers.”

Barry tugged at the bottom of his T-shirt. “I was sleeping. I did not expect…” Barry gestured at the aliens, “… this. Are we in danger?”

“No, don’t worry about that,” Hal said, biting his lower lip. “It’s kind of a long story.”

Barry raised his eyebrows at him. “It’s not like I have anything better to do right now.”

“Alright, alright.” There was a strange flush to Hal’s cheeks, like he was embarrassed or suppressing his laughter. “I am here on behalf of the Corps to renegotiate some of their accords with the Chaxahati —the aliens. As it turns out, their society value partnership and personal bonds above everything else. So to them, my word has no value since I came here alone. They don’t want to hear from me without my other half. The yin to my yang.”

“Me?”

Hal was definitely blushing now. “Yeah. Since you’re my best friend and all. That’s basically the closest thing, right?”

Barry nodded, because arguing about whether an alien civilization considered best friends a proper partnership while in his pajamas was not something he intended to do, ever.

“So I told them about you and they beamed you up here,” Hal finished. “Now we’re gonna be able to start the negotiating.”

“Why didn’t you get one of your Lantern friends? I don’t think I’m qualified to discuss intergalactic treaties.”

Hal winced. “John’s on shore leave and isn’t answering his ring, Guy just laughed at my face and hung up. The aliens were getting impatient and threatened to marry me to one of them, so I panicked and I told them about you.”

One of the aliens interrupted them with something that sounded like a question, but Barry couldn’t make sense of the alien language. He shot an alarmed glance at Hal, who pointed at his power ring.

“Universal translator,” he said. “I’ll do the talking, just stand there and look pretty.”

So Barry did just that, as Hal discussed with the aliens. Barry could only understand the English Hal was speaking, so he tuned out the conversation.

This was not how he planned on spending his Saturday morning but hey, when did his life ever turned out the way he wanted it to?

Once the negotiations were over —after what felt like a couple of hours—, Hal gave him a ride back to Earth. He had to make the construct spaceship bigger than usual, since they were coming back with various gifts from the aliens.

“And what is that for?” Barry asked, picking up something that seemed to be a vase, but shivered whenever Barry looked at it.

“I don’t know,” Hal said, “decoration?”

“Where are we gonna keep all of this stuff?”

Hal shrugged. “I’m sure the Flash Museum will love it.”

Barry snorted. “They’ve definitely seen weirder.” He pointed to what looked like a ten-feet-wide plate, that had writing in an alien alphabet engraved in the middle. “What does that read?”

“Oh,” Hal said. “Uh… The ring says it means something like ‘wishing you lots of love and happiness, congratulations on your wedding, may your respective divinities bless you with a lot of children.’ You know.”

It took Barry a second to register. “What, the aliens think we’re together? You and me, married?” he said, pushing an incredulous tone to his voice. “Talk about yin to your yang.” He forced out a chuckle, and waited for a joke that never came.

Instead of the teasing and laughing Barry usually expected from Hal in this kind of ridiculous situations they somehow got themselves into sometimes, Hal stayed silent, gaze fixed somewhere on Barry’s left, the tips of his ears burning red.

“Hal?” Barry said, waiting for a jab, a one-liner, _anything_ , that showed Hal was in on the joke, that it was all fun banter between best friends, because if they’re seriously talking about how weird it would be for them to be together, Barry wasn’t sure his heart could handle it.

“Would it really be so absurd?” Hal blurted out.

Barry blinked at him. “What?” His heart was racing, because _no, it wouldn’t_. But Barry knew how Hal worked, he knew he would never have a chance at an actual relationship with Mister My-Only-Fear-Is-Commitment, and falling in love with your friends was bad manners anyway, so he had always kept his mouth shut and his feelings in check.

“You and I. Together.” Hal worried his lip. “I mean, when the aliens told me they needed to see my life partner to take me seriously, you’re the first person that came to my mind. Being… with you, it makes sense to me. I don’t know— Ollie brought it up a while back and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Like, I spend all of my time off-duty with you, I basically live at your place, and I know that we’re best friends, and don’t get me wrong I absolutely love that, but some days…”

Hal twisted his hands together, and he looked miserable, like he couldn’t believe he talked himself into pouring his heart out like that. “Some days I want more than best friends. Some days I wish I slept in your bed and not on your couch. You know I’m bad with this stuff, but… I just… I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”

Hal met Barry’s gaze at last, his face raw with emotion in a way it rarely was. “So here’s that,” he finished.

Being in boxers and a T-shirt, inside a construct spaceship, receiving a love confession from his best friend he has been secretly in love with for years was _so_ not how Barry planned on spending his Saturday morning. But it wasn’t like he was complaining.

“Hal,” he said, giving himself a moment to process everything. “I love you too.”

The slump on Hal’s shoulders vanished. “You do?”

Barry took a few steps forward, put his hands on Hal’s arms and drew him into a kiss. It was soft and sweet and maybe a little clumsy, and everything Barry ever dreamed of, which he couldn’t believe he was getting thanks to _aliens_.

“You do,” Hal said after a moment, and Barry could feel his smile against his lips. “When did I get so lucky?”

“I don’t know,” Barry said. “I don’t think we’re that lucky, actually, since the story of how we got together will forever be ‘well it was all because of a giant alien plate’.”

“Ollie is never gonna let me live this one down, but we’re so keeping this plate.”

“I don’t think it’ll fit through the door.”

“It will look great on your balcony,” Hal said, curling his fingers around Barry’s hand.

Barry smiled. “Our balcony.”


End file.
